Comments on: Scraping Property Listings

By: v4t

v4t — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:38:53 +0000

so anyone knows that is it legal for myhousehunt to do the scraping or they have backup from realestates.
I read somewhere that REA complained propertyguru for scraping its data before.
A quite popular recently raising site is http://www.rbasket.com.au .Look like they scrap data from househound and hartcourt.

By: Bill Burdin

Bill Burdin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:24:11 +0000

I would suggest if you open up the API to it’s full potential clever developers would create some killer apps that would blast homehound to the forefront of real estate portals. Personally I can think of several apps that the industry would embrace.

By: Ryan O'Grady

Ryan O'Grady — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:43:22 +0000

We look forward to that and let’s hope some of the other portals follow your lead.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:21:30 +0000

Thanks everyone for their feedback.

The API is early stage and I am sure we will open it up once we have some policies in place.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:21:06 +0000

Alex, good work with the API, but as it stands its pretty useless.
All you can make with it is a HomeHound clone which points everyone back to HomeHound.
I cant think of anything else you can do with it.

What you need to do is go all out and provide full access to *everything* for it to be any use.
Look at say http://www.last.fm/api/intro They have everything.

You then police its usage with a licence agreement to stop people doing things you dont want them to (e.g. must provide credit, no crawling, etc…)

By: Bill Burdin

Bill Burdin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:41:06 +0000

Alex,
Thanks for that, I’m wondering if it’s possible to call the listing agents details in the response.
Thanks
Bill

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:07:11 +0000

Hi Ryan,

The API will return a snippet of the available data but enough for a credible search result. We would then hope the listing is linked back to Homehound so the user can see the full details of the property.

Here is a simple example of a request for sale properties in 2015 (results are paginated) -

http://www.homehound.com.au/api/?api_key=35bea4999ab0f86416316736493a10c4&method=homehound.listing.search&postcode=2015&sale_type=S

Please remember to register your own API key if you decide to use the API as the example key gets changed periodically.

Hope that helps.

Alex

By: Robert Simeon

Robert Simeon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:13:01 +0000

Great post Ryan – and welcome REA make a habit of being outed in yet another clear example of double standards.

By: Ryan O'Grady

Ryan O'Grady — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:55:56 +0000

Alex,

This is very exciting an Australian portal with an API which developers can access. Myhousehunt are probably still scraping, at most they might be receiving xml from Domain. I did try and read your terms and conditions but the link in the API section doesn’t appear to exist.

So, the application credits Homehound. Can the application display all property information which is available of Homehound? Is it a requirement for the application to include a link back to the listing on Homehound? And lastly, can you provide a few examples of apps using your API.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:38:45 +0000

It’s an interesting one; as someone who’s fought against site scrapers before (years ago, I knew not) as I felt (then) that they were not really helping anyone, but themselves and their advertisers, and pretending to have a portal, I was against them. One that was scraping me (but not REA or Domain) from 2002 through to 2005 I took as a personal attack because they had been set up as a portal in opposition previously (starting a few months after we started 10 years ago) and then remorphed into a scraper that took clients they could not win the old fashioned way (like ringing them up, winning their business, developing their site as we did)… so you can see my train of thought.

Nowadays? I suppose Google real estate (all power to them) have changed the game; and others like suburbview scrape listings and link to the agents’ sites. So this could be the future. It’s how it works in the States isn’t it? (Zillow.com, Trulia.com, etc).

If so, then the price of portals is going to zero (hurrah!), and agencies will just need their own website (everything points back to it) and a web developer/system (to feed you up to where you want to be thru APIs, or be scraped…). It won’t happen overnight, but … the slow inexorable shift may be coming.